In the early years of the 21st Century gvnet.com/childprostitution/USA.htm

The United States of America (USA)

The
US has the largest and most technologically powerful economy in the world,
with a per capita GDP of $48,000. In this market-oriented economy, private
individuals and business firms make most of the decisions, and the federal
and state governments buy needed goods and services predominantly in the
private marketplace.

The
onrush of technology largely explains the gradual development of a
"two-tier labor market" in which those at the bottom lack the
education and the professional/technical skills of those at the top and,
more and more, fail to get comparable pay raises, health insurance
coverage, and other benefits.

Since
1975, practically all the gains in household income have gone to the top
20% of households.

Long-term
problems include inadequate investment in economic infrastructure, rapidly
rising medical and pension costs of an aging population, sizable trade and
budget deficits, and stagnation of family income in the lower economic
groups.[The World Factbook, U.S.C.I.A.
2009]

CAUTION: The following links
and accompanying text have been culled from the web to illuminate the
situation in the United
States.Some of these links may lead to websites that present allegations that
are unsubstantiated, misleading or even false.No attempt has been made to validate their
authenticity or to verify their content.

It points-out that
“the vast majority of youth involved in prostitution are girls, although some
service providers see an increase in the number of boys.” It notes that
the average age most girls get involved in prostitution is at 14-years and
the median age of involvement is 15.5-years. However, it reports
child prostitutes being picked up by police at only 11 or 12-years and even
9-years of age. It stresses that child prostitutes come from throughout
the country, inner-cities, suburbs and small-towns, and from all walks-of-life.
But it notes, “larger cities are more likely to have a higher proportion of
boys involved in prostitution”. [Department of Justice, NIS-MART, 2002]

There is a second,
and apparently growing, form of prostitution that is apparently “voluntary”
and involves the exchange of “favors” like dope, money or other
presents. A study by Jessica Edwards, of the Pacific Institute for
Research and Evaluation, found that an estimated 650,000 American teenagers
exchange sex for favors. More surprising, more boys were likely to sell
themselves than girls.

CHANGED BY
TECHNOLOGY
- Police are finding the business of prostitution is much more sophisticated
than it was a decade ago.Technology,
the Internet, and cell phones have all changed the game. Pimps now use
technology to sell girls as young as 11 or 12 for sex on the Internet and on
the street."The younger the
girls, the more protected by the pimp," Wiley said.

When children are
arrested on the street, typically their pimps are watching from nearby,
making it difficult for police to go after them because the No. 1 rule of
prostitution is to "never give up your pimp," Saleda
said.Some prostitutes answer to a
"bottom bitch," or a senior girl tasked with disciplining, training
and collecting money."They are
the buffer between the pimp and the girls, which makes it harder to bring a
case against a pimp," Saleda said.Many girls are manipulated and forced into
prostitution by their pimps who provide them with a replacement family for
the troubled homes they come from. Other "guerrilla pimps" rape and
beat the girls before putting them on the street."No one wakes up in the morning and says,
'I want to be a prostitute, this is great,'" Saleda
said. "They are constantly raped and robbed and it's glamorized in pop
culture."

At the age of 15,
Samantha Walker was lured into prostitution on the streets of Toledo, Ohio, then taken against her will to Atlanta. What makes her story unique
is that she testified against one of the men who paid for sex with her,
helping to send him to prison. But just weeks after the trial she took an
overdose of drugs she was taking for depression and died at the age of
18. More than 300,000 children are being sexually exploited in the US, according to a study by the University of Pennsylvania. Many of them end up in Atlanta, which has
become a hub for prostitution in part because its busy airport makes it a
destination for men seeking sex.

msburg home, the
13-year-old girl was given a choice. Either she would have sex with two men
nearly twice her age or she would be given back to her kidnapper.
Already in the week since Demont Bowie told the
suburban Minneapolis
girl she belonged to him, he'd beaten and abused her, starved her and
deprived her of sleep. He traded her body to his friends and even a mechanic.
When Demont told her to do something to someone,
she did. There was no refusing. He'd said he'd kill her, kill her family, if
she tried to leave. –
htcp

Many girls begin
working the streets before they are teenagers, and police say that
prostitutes continue to get younger because that age group generates more
money.Child prostitutes are sometimes
runaways or girls with unhappy home lives, police said.These girls are referred to as
"throwaway children" - they have no family that cares for them, and
are alone. But police also are seeing many coming from middle-class and
sometimes wealthy families."It's
gotten to the point where there is nothing specific or definite about what
girls end up in prostitution," Schemers said.

Pimps, usually men
younger than 25, recruit the girls from shopping malls, schools and over the
Internet. When drawing girls into the sex trade, pimps make them feel like
part of a family.But then pimps turn
on the girls and use threats and physical abuse to enslave them."It's so powerful that once they are
brought into that environment, there's no getting out," Schemers said.

Justin's dark
coming-of-age story is a collateral effect of recent technological advances.
Minors, often under the online tutelage of adults, are opening for-pay
pornography sites featuring their own images sent onto the Internet by
inexpensive Webcams. And they perform from the privacy of home, while parents
are nearby, beyond their children's closed bedroom door.

***
ARCHIVES ***

Runaways
- Where To Turn For Help Before You Are Homeless
- 1-800-621-4000

Rebeccas Community -- This
is for anyone aged up to 13 years old who is thinking about running away

Here are the best
phone numbers to call …They are Confidential - which means they won't tell
anyone about your call unless you want them to talk to somebody for you, or
you are in danger.They are open 24
Hours - it doesn't matter what time you call.In the USA,
call 1-800-621-4000

Runaways

KidsVoice, March 09, 2004

www.kidsvoiceorg.com/Guardian/Episodes.aspx?episode=date20040309

[accessed 9 August 2011]

Most runaway
children do not realize the dangers of living on the streets. According to
the National Runaway Switchboard, 75% of runaways will become involved in
theft, drugs or pornography. One out of every three teens on the street will
be lured into prostitution within 48 hours of leaving home.

"At 12 years old, and it was a really horrible experience for me. But
after that first time, I was so degraded, I was like, ‘Whatever, I did it
once, might as well do it again," said Dettrea
King.King said she worked as
prostitute for five years. She said she experienced horrors that no child
ever should.“I’ve been kidnapped,
beat up, raped. I had my hair cut off,” King said. “He told me to say goodbye
to my family because he was going to kill me.”

King said every day
she had to hand over $1,000 to her pimp.“He took everything. You don’t keep anything. He makes sure you have
nice clothes, hair and nails done so you look the part, but as far as you
having anything in your pocket -- maybe $20, $40. But other than that, you
don’t get anything," King said.After five years and thousands of johns, she said she finally wound up
in jail.“By me going to jail and
getting locked up -- it saved my life,” King said.

"I prostituted
since I was 10-years-old," said Monica. "The first time I ran away
from home, it was with this guy. He was 17 and I told him that I was 15. And
I decided I wanted to leave because I lost my virginity the day before that,
so I thought, OK, let me just run the streets. And having sex was fun, so I
just thought it would be fun, but it was not."She returned home but ran away again and
got involved with other pimps, who tutored her in the business. By the age of
12, she was a regular on the streets of Oakland.Monica looks a little older than her 14
years, but she says that her customers, or tricks, clearly understood she was
a child."I guess they didn't
care," she said. "One trick I had hopped in the car with when I was
in Oakland, I
told him that I was 12 years old. He said, oh, it doesn't matter. I'll give
you extra money."

Jasmine Caldwell was 14 and selling sex on the
streets when an opportunity arose to escape her pimp: an undercover policeman
picked her up. The cop could have rescued her from the pimp, who ran a
string of 13 girls and took every cent they earned. If the cop had taken
Jasmine to a shelter, she could have resumed her education and tried to put
her life back in order.

Instead, the policeman showed her his
handcuffs and threatened to send her to prison. Terrified, she cried and
pleaded not to be jailed. Then, she said, he offered to release her in
exchange for sex. Afterward, the policeman returned her to the street.
Then her pimp beat her up for failing to collect any money. “That
happens a lot,” said Jasmine, who is now 21. “The cops sometimes just want to
blackmail you into having sex.”

Documentary examines U.S. child
sex trade

Reuters, New York, 29 April 2009

www.nanyang100.com/world/5852.html

[accessed 9 August 2011]

Filmmaker Libby Spears wanted to to make a
documentary about the sexual exploitation of kids in Asia and Latin America,
but that changed when she discovered that child sex trafficking is a big
problem in the United States.

The Girl Next Door May Now Be on the Corner

Marian Wright Edelman, President of the
Children's Defense Fund, The Huffington Post, March 16, 2009

One such story is
of a 13-year-old girl who ran away to New
York City to escape sexual abuse at home. Without
friends or money, she met a man who said he could introduce her to someone
who would employ her to dance at parties. But the offer turned out to be an
entry-level job as a prostitute, and her new "employer" sold her at
a rate of $40 for oral sex and $80 for intercourse. Over a period of three
weeks, her pimp arranged a series of "parties" where she had sex
with more than 20 men.

Among the million
and a half children who run away from home each year, traffickers ensnare
tens of thousands of them into the sex trade through rape, drug addition,
coercion, deception, brute force and abduction. They are transported far from
their homes to isolate them from family and friends. In late October 2008,
federal law enforcement agents broke up more than a dozen child prostitution
and sex trafficking rings operating in several cities involving girls and
boys from ages 13 to 17. These youths are sold like cartons of cigarettes and
six packs of beer in urban working-class neighborhoods, as well as suburban
and rural communities, and purchased online though an Internet sexual slave
market.

Two teenaged girls
were arrested for allegedly pimping other students
for prostitution, Phoenix
police said.

Investigators said
the suspects recruited at least five girls, ages 14 to 17.Finley and Tye,
who were allegedly involved in prostitution themselves, were responsible for
recruiting, teaching and receiving money from the other girls who worked for
them, police said.At one point, the
two rented an apartment where they conducted the prostitution operation,
according to investigators.

Some truckers claim
prostitution is only a matter of working girls trying to make a living and
therefore, victimless. But according to statistics — and law enforcement —
they’re either fooling themselves, misinformed, or both. An ABC TV Prime Time
Crime special this summer asserted that “thou-sands of teens are forced into
truck stop sex,” with an FBI spokesman adding that truck stops are uniquely
suited to prostitution because at night the parking lots are isolated and out
of the view of the public and police.

Sometimes, parents,
themselves, are involved.Driver
Anthony Cleveland told The Trucker he saw a mother put out her 14-year-old
daughter to turn tricks at an Alabama
truck stop; he knew it was the girl’s mother because the woman’s identity was
revealed when she was later arrested and charged.

FASHION’S DIRTY
HANDS
- When Vanity Fair published an Annie Leibovitz
photo showing 15-year-old Miley Cyrus clutching a sheet, baring her back, it
touched off a firestorm of controversy about the sexualization
of children. Such images, combined with provocative
clothing marketed to pre-teens, helps pump demand for prostituted
children, says McCullough.

“If we show pictures of 15-year-olds posed
in a sexually provocative manner, why are we surprised when there is a demand
for 13-year-olds?” says McCullough.

One of McCullough’s
friends went shopping with her 6-year-old. As they went through the clothing
for sale, the mom kept vetoing clothing with the mantra “this is not
appropriate, this is not appropriate.” Finally, the 6-year-old asked: “Mama,
if these are not appropriate, why do they make it in my size?”

Hundreds of teens
selling sex make connections using Internet sites like Craigslist.com, simply
standing along a two-mile stretch of Holt Boulevard in Ontario or hooking up at local truck
stops, investigators said.

Young workers in the oldest profession -
Clark County girls make up a third of the underage sex workers in Portland

Sarah was 16 and
addicted to crack cocaine when she heard there was easy money to make in the
parking lot of a fast food restaurant off Fourth Plain Boulevard.“I went there to pick up guys,” Sarah, 22,
said. “They would buy me what I wanted as long as I had sex with them.”After working for a year in Vancouver, Sarah ventured to Portland. Willowy, her greasy blond hair
pulled tight into a bun, she looks exhausted.“I got here on Sandy
and 82nd, and this guy, D.C., asked me if I wanted to get high,” she said one
morning last summer, sitting on a curb in northeast Portland. “Then he told me I owed him money
and to go get money.”Sarah was
trapped. She’d fallen prey to a pimp’s come-on and become one of the 20 to 30
juveniles Portland
police say work the streets at any given time. Like more than a third of
those girls, she is from Vancouver.
And like many of them, she remains beyond the reach of police efforts to
separate her from her pimp. It’s been six years, and Sarah is still on the
streets.

‘SNITCHES DIE, YOU
KNOW’
- “I can cite case after case of girls coming from average families, and once
the pimp was able to intervene, the family didn’t matter anymore,” Dick said.
“I know of officers’ daughters who got into it, a federal prosecutor’s
daughter, a DA’s daughter, a politician’s daughter.”Cherise was a rebellious 15-year-old when
she met her first pimp, Deandre Green, at LloydCenter in Portland. Green was a 25-year-old Bloods
gang member from Aloha, Ore.He sweet-talked her to a nondescript,
two-story motel and told her the rules: This is business, don’t be out of
pocket, respect your pimp and give me all your money.According to court documents, when Cherise
said she had second thoughts, Green said, “I know where you live and where
your family lives. I will kill you and your family if you say anything to
anybody. You’re mine now.”

2 Houston
Men Accused In Child Sex Ring

Click2Houston, October 27, 2008

www.click2houston.com/news/17817123/detail.html

[accessed 9 August 2011]

Two Houston men were
arrested in a nationwide crackdown on child sex rings and prostitution, KPRC
Local 2 reported Monday.A total of
642 people were arrested in the three-day sting.

Across the country,
73 pimps and 518 adult prostitutes were arrested under the crackdown in 29
different cities, FBI officials said.Forty-seven children were rescued. Their ages range from 13 to 17
years old.Ten of them had been
reported missing to the NationalCenter for Missing and
Exploited Children."This
operation targeted known street tracks, in and out call services, truck
stops, casinos and Internet sites," said John Pistole,
the FBI deputy director. "Child prostitution is a growing problem across
the country."Most of the victims
are runaways lured by child predators, officials said.

Connecticut Man Sentenced to
360 Months in Prison for Leading Brutal Sex Trafficking Ring That Victimized U.S.
Citizens

Evidence presented at
trial demonstrated that Paris operated a
prostitution scheme in the Hartford,
Conn., area in which he
exploited young, uneducated girls from troubled backgrounds and forced them
to perform commercial sex acts for his financial benefit. The evidence demonstrated
that Paris
used a combination of deception, fraud, coercion, brutal rapes, threats of arrest, physical violence and manipulation of
addictive drugs to maintain control over his victims.

The evidence
established that Paris "purchased" two of the victims from a
co-defendant, Brian Forbes, who previously pleaded guilty to five counts of
sex trafficking and was sentenced to 13 years in prison for his role in
recruiting and exploiting minors and vulnerable young women into
prostitution, as well as using beatings, rapes, drug withdrawal, threats and
unlawful restraint, to compel them to perform commercial sex acts. – htcp

ECPAT Global Monitoring Report on the
status of action against commercial exploitation of children - USA[PDF]

ECPAT International, 2006

www.ecpat.net/A4A_2005/PDF/Americas/Global_Monitoring_Report-USA.pdf

[accessed 9 August 2011]

There is limited
information available on the commercial sexual exploitation of children
(CSEC) and adolescents within the United States. The absence of
published facts and figures beyond estimates and small-scale local
information highlights the pressing need for systematic and verifiable
qualitative and quantitative information to guide national level action.

The prostitution of
children is a widespread phenomenon, and over the past couple of years
several articles in prominent press media, such as Newsweek magazine,1 have
highlighted a growing problem of prostitution of girls from many different
income levels. Sadly, members of the public and law enforcement view children
in prostitution as a public nuisance or as immoral, bad kids, if not
criminals. They tend not to see American children in prostitution as
“innocent victims”, in the same way as they might see poor, young foreign
children who may be kidnapped, sold or trafficked to the US for such
purposes. Rather, American girls are seen as willing participants, mostly
inner city teenagers who “know just what they are getting into and deserve
what they get”.

Hidden epidemic: Children recruited to be
sex slaves

Eric Johnson, WTOP News, Washington, August 11, 2008

www.wtop.com/?nid=858&sid=1457483

[accessed 9 August 2011]

"They seek out
children who may have any sort of vulnerability -- vulnerability from sexual
abuse as a child, vulnerability from homelessness, vulnerability from all
different hosts of issues."

"This fellow
would drive around the District, see teenage girls on the street, entice them
into his car, force them to disrobe and perform sex acts, hold them captive
and then force them into acts of prostitution."Myles notes that the pimps have learned to
go after children in or around places that are hard for kids to avoid."They target schools. They target
parks. They target bus stops. They target malls," he says. "They
even target places like group shelters and group homes. If your full-time
effort, all-day, every-day is just to recruit children, you really learn to
focus on the different places the kids are."

It points-out that
“the vast majority of youth involved in prostitution are girls, although some
service providers see an increase in the number of boys.” It notes that
the average age most girls get involved in prostitution is at 14-years and
the median age of involvement is 15.5-years. However, it reports
child prostitutes being picked up by police at only 11 or 12-years and even
9-years of age. It stresses that child prostitutes come from throughout
the country, inner-cities, suburbs and small-towns, and from all
walks-of-life. But it notes, “larger cities are more likely to have a
higher proportion of boys involved in prostitution”. [Department of
Justice, NIS-MART, 2002]

There is a second,
and apparently growing, form of prostitution that is apparently “voluntary”
and involves the exchange of “favors” like dope, money or other
presents. A study by Jessica Edwards, of the Pacific Institute for
Research and Evaluation, found that an estimated 650,000 American teenagers
exchange sex for favors. More surprising, more boys were likely to sell
themselves than girls.

The average age of
a child first used in prostitution is 11 to 14, with some as young as 9 years
of age. Children used in prostitution consist of both male and female victims
and come from all ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. A large percentage of
these children left home because of physical, sexual, and psychological
abuse. These children often have low self-esteem and are extremely
vulnerable. These runaways become a prime target for sex offenders,
pornographers, and pimps. Prostitution is a continuation of the victim's
sexual exploitation, not the beginning. According to U.S. law and international
agreements, children can never consent to prostitution; it is always
exploitation.

Juveniles who
become involved in sexual trafficking face a myriad of obstacles and enormous
needs if they want to leave that life, including very basic needs such as
safe housing, subsistence, and schooling. In addition, they may need drug
treatment, medical treatment, and mental health services. They may have
problems related to victimization prior to their life on the streets. Most
cannot return to their family of origin, so they need help to prepare for
independent living.

Child prostitution,
a large and growing problem across the United States, is especially
severe in tourist and convention cities. Atlanta, for example, has been identified
by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as one of 14 American cities with the
highest rates of child prostitution.

A report earlier
this year by the Barton Child Law and Policy Clinic at EmoryUniversity estimated that hundreds
of children were being used as prostitutes throughout Georgia. They
come from troubled families and often have histories of truancy. They
typically run away from home after being sexually abused.Once on the street, they face increased
risks of being battered or killed. They are also likely to experience drug
addiction or psychiatric disorders and contract — and spread — diseases. They
may eventually recreate their personal disasters in the lives of their
children.

Children of the Night: Child Prostitution
Is America’s Dirty Little Secret

John W. Whitehead, The Rutherford
Institute, 7/28/2008

www.rutherford.org/articles_db/commentary.asp?record_id=544

[accessed 9 August 2011]

Amazingly, many
children are introduced to prostitution by family members or acquaintances
such as parents, older siblings or boyfriends. The internet, especially
websites such as Craigslist, Facebook and MySpace, has made it even easier to
prey on children without being easily detected by law enforcement.

Child prostitution
is America’s
“dirty little secret,” one that cuts across racial and socio-economic
divides. As Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin observed, “It’s one of those
issues that doesn’t get discussed and therefore there’s an assumption that
perhaps either it doesn’t exist at all or the young women and girls who are
prostitutes are there by their own free will.” Yet there is little to suggest
that these children ever willingly choose such a lifestyle. Even the term
“child prostitute” is something of a misnomer, suggesting that it is the
child—and not the adult handler—who has opted to sell him or herself for sex.

Children who are
sold for sex (the majority are female) typically range in age from 11 to 17,
with some as young as 9 years old. Once they have been lured or forced into
prostituting themselves, these children are subjected to a full range of
injuries, diseases, pregnancies, mental issues such as post-traumatic stress
disorder and depression and drug addiction, not to mention criminal and
delinquency charges if they are caught. For those who are “rescued” out of
the system, the stigma of having once been part of the sex trade is hard to
overcome.

The NationalCenter
for Missing & Exploited Children says between 100,000 and 300,000
underage boys and girls -- some as young as five years old -- are abused in
prostitution each year in the United
States. Pat Trueman,
the former chief child exploitation prosecutor for the U.S. Department of
Justice, says the public needs to understand what that number really means.

"I've actually
seen kids on the streets of New
York who were 12, 13 years old prostituting
themselves, with a pimp down the street watching their every move,"
shares Trueman. "So this is not unusual; if
anything, it's quite a commonplace occurrence in your bigger cities. But
you're seeing it in mid-level cities, as well."

Trueman says children end
up in prostitution in a variety of ways, almost none of which are completely
voluntary. "What pimps do is find vulnerable kids -- who are either
runaways, throwaways, or they might find them online where they're willing to
be more risqué.

New York struggles over
child prostitution - Criminals or abuse victims?

She seems like a
typical shy high school kid. Little about her suggests the tortured story she
tells: At 14 she ran away from sexual abuse at home and met a 24-year-old guy
who seemed like he wanted to be her boyfriend - until he told her he wanted
to be her pimp. "I was like, wow," recalled the girl, now 16,
though she looks younger. She was shocked, but desperate, she said. "At
the time I needed a place to sleep, so I was like, 'Fine, I'll go along with
it.' "On
and off for the next two years, she said, she traded sex for cash, under the
control of several different men who took most of the money for themselves.
Her work as a child prostitute caused her to be arrested in March and placed
in detention.

Now New York is struggling
with the question of how to treat young girls who are involved in
prostitution. Are they criminals - or child abuse victims?

"Very Young
Girls” is an 83-minute documentary film that opens on Friday at the IFCCenter
in Greenwich Village.

The film offers a
vivid and disturbing look at the sexual exploitation and trafficking of
teenage girls in New York City.
The average age of girls when they enter the sex industry is 13.

2 child prostitutes discovered in Phoenix, 6 males
detained

[access information unavailable]

Officers discovered
two minors involved in prostitution during a sweep in Phoenix on Tuesday evening.Maryvale Precinct
Patrol Officers found the first victim during a sweep in the area of McDowell Road
from 35th to 51st avenues at approximately 8:40 p.m.The 14-year-old admitted prostitute had
been listed as a run-away since she was 13-years-old.Phoenix Police Department was contacted for
further investigation into the victim's involvement in child prostitution and
it was discovered that she had been working for a "Pimp" since the
time she ran away from her home.

A recent spate of
arrests in 16 cities put 345 people behind bars accused of involvement in
child prostitution -- and 21 children were rescued. But that's only the tip
of the iceberg, according to one pro-family advocate.There are likely many thousands of
children, mostly runaways or throwaways, on the streets of this nation,
largely supporting themselves through prostitution. Chris Gacek
of the Family Research Council believes child prostitution is a big business
now, partly because of the Internet.

But why would a
girl sell her body online?To help
answer that question, Sacramento
police made arrangements for CNN to interview a 14-year-old girl who said
she'd started selling herself as a prostitute at the age of 11.

"I wanted to
feel loved. ... I wanted to feel important," said the teen, who did not
want to be identified.She said she
used Craigslist because it was free and she could post dozens of ads a day.
Even though she understood the seriousness of what she was doing, she said
she didn't care.

"You could put
stuff in your ad like 'wet and wild,' 'fun and sassy,' things like that to
catch their attention, to make them want you," she said.

The federal
indictment alleges that from January 1, 2000 to February 20, 2005, Barkau trained the minor to be a sexual dominatrix by
engaging her in bondage activities with himself and
forcing her in other sexual activities while he watched. With extensive
force and violence Barkau made the girl serve as
dominatrix beginning at 12 years old. When the girl was 14 years old,
the motion alleges Barkau created his online
business for "Mistress Alisha," both Barkau
and the child’s mother earned tens of thousand of dollars. The
Department of Justice says it is the first time in the United States
that parents have been alleged to profit from their own child this way.

Study details concerns about Spokane-area
human trafficking

The Seattle
Times, SpokaneWashington, May 12, 2008 -- Information
from The Spokesman-Review

Prostitution accounts
for the largest form of human trafficking in the region with an estimated 500
adult women and an unknown number of men and underage boys and girls
providing sex for money through escort businesses, massage parlors, drug
houses and on the streets, the study found.

One of those
surveyed in the study said about a third of those selling sex in the Spokane area had been
sold into prostitution by their mothers.Male prostitution is "much hidden" and those involved
"are especially vulnerable," DuPey wrote."Spokane
has a significant teen prostitution problem and is considered an entry area
for child prostitutes," the study found. The youngsters "are
initiated here and then moved into larger metro areas."

Child prostitution
has been Oakland's
dirty little secret for a while now. It's one of those things that a lot of
people know exists — certainly anyone who has ever driven certain stretches
of International Boulevard or San Pablo Avenue.

One of the most
disturbing stories in the Tribune series was reporter Kamika
Dunlap's interview with a 14-year-old girl who was identified only as
Desiree.Here's what our readers who
have been following the series know: Desiree ran away from home after a trip
to the mall and ended up being sold as a prostitute on Craigslist. She was
forced by her pimp to have sex with as many as five men a day. She contracted
a painful venereal disease that made it impossible for her to work and
eventually made her quit and return to her family.

CHANGED BY
TECHNOLOGY
- Police are finding the business of prostitution is much more sophisticated
than it was a decade ago.Technology,
the Internet, and cell phones have all changed the game. Pimps now use
technology to sell girls as young as 11 or 12 for sex on the Internet and on
the street."The younger the
girls, the more protected by the pimp," Wiley said.

When children are
arrested on the street, typically their pimps are watching from nearby,
making it difficult for police to go after them because the No. 1 rule of
prostitution is to "never give up your pimp," Saleda
said.Some prostitutes answer to a
"bottom bitch," or a senior girl tasked with disciplining, training
and collecting money."They are
the buffer between the pimp and the girls, which makes it harder to bring a
case against a pimp," Saleda said.Many girls are manipulated and forced into
prostitution by their pimps who provide them with a replacement family for
the troubled homes they come from. Other "guerrilla pimps" rape and
beat the girls before putting them on the street."No one wakes up in the morning and
says, 'I want to be a prostitute, this is great,'" Saleda
said. "They are constantly raped and robbed and it's glamorized in pop
culture."

In the basement of
an ordinary-looking Williamsburg
home, the 13-year-old girl was given a choice. Either she would have sex with
two men nearly twice her age or she would be given back to her kidnapper.Already in the week since Demont Bowie told the suburban Minneapolis girl she belonged to him, he'd
beaten and abused her, starved her and deprived her of sleep. He traded her
body to his friends and even a mechanic. When Demont
told her to do something to someone, she did. There was no refusing. He'd
said he'd kill her, kill her family, if she tried to leave. – htcp

When an 11- and
12-year-old girl disappeared last month, and police suspected they ended up
prostituting themselves on the streets, the entire community took
notice.But what many don't realize is
that those missing girls are just two of the legions of children turning
tricks in an exploding local prostitution business, filling the pockets of
pimps.In the past 10 months alone, at
least 170 children between 11 and 17 were referred to a local counseling
agency because they'd been peddled on the streets for sex.These exploited children work for pimps who
quit drug dealing for the more lucrative and less risky trade of selling young
girls for sex.

Many girls begin
working the streets before they are teenagers, and police say that
prostitutes continue to get younger because that age group generates more
money.Child prostitutes are sometimes
runaways or girls with unhappy home lives, police said.These girls are referred to as
"throwaway children" - they have no family that cares for them, and
are alone. But police also are seeing many coming from middle-class and
sometimes wealthy families."It's
gotten to the point where there is nothing specific or definite about what
girls end up in prostitution," Schemers said.

Pimps, usually men
younger than 25, recruit the girls from shopping malls, schools and over the
Internet. When drawing girls into the sex trade, pimps make them feel like
part of a family.But then pimps turn
on the girls and use threats and physical abuse to enslave them."It's so powerful that once they are
brought into that environment, there's no getting out," Schemers said.

The preliminary
report, released this week, describes Las
Vegas as a hub for child sex trafficking. More
than 400 children were found working as prostitutes in Las Vegas during a single month last year,
according to the study. Statistics show many of the girls are recruited
from Oregon and Washington. They are beaten and
tortured by pimps. “The runaway child here or the child recruited or
snatched from the mall is sold in Seattle, or California, Las Vegas, AtlantaGeorgia,
wherever there is a critical mass of buyers,” says Linda Smith, founder of
Shared Hope International.

FBI: Pimps force child prostitutes into
underground networks

Jeff McShan, 11
News Houston,
March 26, 2008

At one time this article had been archived
and may possibly still be accessible [here]

[accessed 10 August 2011]

In 2006, around Hillcroft and the Southwest Freeway, the teen – then 13
years old—and three other women were arrested during a sting targeting
prostitutes.It’s prevalent in
southwest Houston,
and all too often the women turning tricks aren’t women at all – they’re
girls.The FBI says many of the child
prostitutes are brought to Houston
by pimps.

Special Agent
Walther said many of the child prostitutes no longer work the streets, but
now they’re involved in organized underground networks.

Just this past
Saturday, for example, a 13-year-old girl was arrested inside a Dallas bar for allegedly
recruiting her middle school classmates to dance and sell sex there.“One of the remarkable things that we have
learned about this is that there really is a tremendous amount of money
involved. There is a high demand for young girls in the prostitution world,”
Lt. Ches Williams of the Dallas Police Department
said.

Most prostituted
women and youth are coerced by poverty, racism, lack of opportunity, and drug
and alcohol addictions. The average age of prostitution is 13 in the United States,
so a woman has likely been abused for five years when she turns 18 and
supposedly chooses to be a whore.

At one time this article had been archived
and may possibly still be accessible [here]

Targeted by a
criminal ring of human traffickers operating near Detroit,
Flores’ ordeal began when she was lured to the
home of a classmate, drugged and sexually assaulted.A devout Catholic who did not want to
shame her parents, Flores didn’t think she
had a choice when the ring’s operators blackmailed her with pictures of the
assault, threatening to show the photos to her father and her priest.The traffickers did not kidnap Flores from her home, but used threats, intimidation
and blackmail to force her into prostitution while she lived under her
parents’ roof.Over the next two
years, Flores would remain in a world of
prostitution, where she was routinely sexually assaulted and brutalized while
her traffickers profited.

Describing herself
as "a nice Catholic girl who lived in a large, suburban house" near
Detroit during her teenage years, she said she was targeted by traffickers,
drugged, and date-raped at the age of 15 - "I was just a kid," she
said - and then blackmailed and forced to work as a prostitute "for two
long years."

"They said
they would kill me and my family and my dog if I didn't do what they
said," reported Flores, adding that she
was "beaten into silence every night" by her captors. Throughout
her ordeal, she said, she was permitted to live at home, sneaking out every
night to turn tricks, and then returning home and going to school the next
day. Once, she said, she was kidnapped, taken to inner-city Detroit, and "tortured for hours and
hours and left for dead" before being returned to her emotionally absent
parents by an unsympathetic police officer. Only when her father moved the
family to another city after a job transfer, she said, did she finally break
with her captors.

A Prostitute´s View of the Spitzer Sex
Scandal

SukiFalconberg,
American Chronicle, March 12, 2008

amchron.soundenterprises.net/articles/view/55137

[accessed 14 Aug2013]

Runaways, very
young, who fall into whoring as a way of finding love, acceptance, and survival are the norm, not the exception in America.
You don´t have to go to Bangkok or Cambodia to
find girl exploited by the sex industry. A thriving child prostitution busi-ness in Atlanta,
Georgia sells
ones as young as 11 and 12 and these girls (mostly black) report being raped
up to 30 times a night.

The CyberTipline, http://www.cybertipline.com, the nation's
system for reporting suspected sexual exploitation of children will celebrate
10 years of operation this week. Operated by the National Center for Missing
& Exploited Children (NCMEC), the CyberTipline
has processed more than 570,000 reports of sex crimes against children, some
as young as two weeks old.

Woman faces 11 years prison for kidnapping
El Mirage girl

Gary Sarnoff, ABC-15

At one time this article had been archived
and may possibly still be accessible [here]

[accessed 10 August 2011]

Police said Butler and five others
abducted the 15-year-old girl from El Mirage and sold her as a prostitute
over the internet.They initially
forced the girl to sleep caged in a dog kennel, according to
authorities.She was rescued by police
after 42 days of captivity.

At one time this article had been archived
and may possibly still be accessible [here]

Recent quarterly
results from an ongoing independent tracking study indicate that more than 250
adolescent girls are being commercially sexually exploited each month in Georgia
through the Internet, escort services and on the streets. This survey was
commissioned by the "A Future. Not a Past" campaign to stop the
prostitution of children in Georgia.

These
young girls are often runaways from the communities we call home. They are
from Atlanta, from Savannah,
from Macon, from Albany,
from Dalton —- and even from towns like Cairo, Jesup and Sylvania. Many of these
runaways are escaping homes where they have been physically and sexually
abused. But they are running from a bad situation into something even worse.

Child Sex Slavery in Georgia

Editorial by Tom Rawlings, Georgia's
Child Advocate for the Protection of Children, The True Citizen, 2008-02-20

Over the past
decade, juvenile justice authorities and police have noted a significant
problem of children being sexually exploited by pimps in the Southeast and
especially on the streets of metropolitan Atlanta. "Commercial sexual
exploitation" describes children engaging in sexual activities for
money, profit or any other consideration due to the coercion or influence by
an adult, syndicate or group, and it's not new to the United States.
It's a problem that child advocates in other parts of the country, such as
the Children of the Night organization in California, have been fighting for three
decades. An estimated 300,000 children in the United States are current victims
of commercial sex exploitation.

Imagine this:
you're 12. Your parent has a drug problem. Your parent's "significant
other" enjoys coming in your room late at night when your parent is
passed out. Every time you get angry about it and try to vent, your parent
either hits you or calls the police and has you locked up in the youth
detention center. Your whole life has been like this, and you're angry about
it. What would you do? Like many children of troubled families, you run
away.Unfortunately, you will likely
go from the frying pan to the fire.Half of runaways are approached for sex and prostitution within 48
hours of hitting the streets, experts say. Records of recent federal pimp
prosecutions in Atlanta
reveal a world in which adult men and women lure these girls and boys in with
offers of friendship, money, or drugs and then beat them into submission with
coat hangers and baseball bats.

For the second time
in as many weeks, a Texas
woman is accused of prostituting her child.In the latest case, authorities say Stephanie Hays (right), a 33-year-old
suburban Houston woman, offered to let a Missouri man have sex with her
11-year-old son, 2-year-old niece and 5-year-old nephew.

This is the second
case in less than a week involving a Texas
parent charged with offering their child for sex. Last week, a 25-year-old San Antonio mother and
her married boyfriend were charged with trying to prostitute the woman's
5-year-old daughter.

ARIZONA: DVD Reveals Risk
of Child Prostitution

Cecilia Chan, ArizonaRepublic (Phoenix), December 17, 2007

www.aegis.com/news/ads/2007/AD072627.html

[accessed 10 August 2011]

And according to an
undercover sergeant with the Phoenix
police vice enforcement unit, seven years ago the average age of a child
prostitute was 15. Today, it is 13, the sergeant said.

At the age of 15,
Samantha Walker was lured into prostitution on the streets of Toledo, Ohio, then taken against her will to Atlanta.What makes her story unique is that she testified against one of the
men who paid for sex with her, helping to send him to prison. But just weeks
after the trial she took an overdose of drugs she was taking for depression
and died at the age of 18.More than
300,000 children are being sexually exploited in the US, according to a study by the University of Pennsylvania. Many of them end up in Atlanta, which has
become a hub for prostitution in part because its busy airport makes it a
destination for men seeking sex.

Ghana: Rescuing the
Child Prostitute, Whose Responsibility?

Wisdom DzidediDonkor, Public Agenda (Accra), 5 November 2007

allafrica.com/stories/200711051563.html

[partially accessed 10 August 2011 - access
restricted]

RESEARCH FINDINGS - It is believed that
one third of street-level prostitutes in the U.S. are less 18 years old while
fifty percent of off-street prostitutes are less than 18 years old.Off-street prostitution includes massage parlors,
strip clubs, and escort services. According to Estes and Weiner, 12 to 14 is
the average age of entry into prostitution for girls under 17 years old in
the United States
while the average age of entry into prostitution is between 11 and 13.

Report from Toronto 2007: Very Young Girls

HarrietteYahr,
Media Rights, November 1, 2007

At one time this article had been archived
and may possibly still be accessible [here]

[accessed 10 August 2011]

WHAT DREW YOU TO THE
SUBJECT MATTER? -
We were researching topics for a proposed series about kids in conflict
zones, and one topic on our list was international sex trafficking, you know,
young girls bought and sold in Russia
or Cambodia.
We looked into the issue, and found sex trafficking was going on right near
our office, in our city.It turns out
if you are seduced and coerced and brought to New York
City for the purposes of prostitution from the Ukraine, and
you're caught, under the 2002 Human Trafficking Act you will get help and
social services. But if you are seduced and coerced and brought to New York City from Bridgeport,
Connecticut, and you’re caught,
you are going to jail

WHAT DOES THAT SAY
TO YOU, ABOUT SOCIETY?
- I think we, as a society, are ready to accept as a victim any 12, 13, or 14
year old who is seduced or manipulated into sex by a soccer coach, an uncle,
a self-styled religious prophet, or a priest. But we don't, yet, if the
predator is a pimp. I think that is because historically we’ve accepted
prostitution, here and there, more or less, as not so bad, like gambling. But
now that we live in a world where sexual exploitation begins so young, we
really have to rethink that view.

Investigator John Cleere and case workers Connie Foster and Lynda Stanistreet were part of a joint investigation that began
in December 2005 and ultimately unearthed several victims ranging in age from
1-year-old to 15-years-old. The types of abuse and exploitation included
sexual abuse, physical abuse, neglect, drugs and child prostitution.

Feds jail man for being a child pimp

Jeff McShan,
KVUE-11 News, October 12, 2007

At one time this article had been archived
and may possibly still be accessible [here]

[accessed 10 August 2011]

FBI Special Agent
Vanessa Walther says two girls, ages 14-and 15-years-old, testified against Anderson.“These guys prey on girls with low self
esteem,” said Walther. “They look for what makes that girl tick. Maybe she
comes from a poor background and needs money or she is just looking for a
boyfriend who loves her and she doesn’t feel pretty.”

A 15-year-old girl
told police Veidt raped her in Hutton's apartment
after Veidt forced her into a car driven by Hutton
on Aug. 29.

Hutton, who drove a
silver Suburban and a black Mercedes and used the moniker "MC,"
attracted young runaways or girls not living with their parents, court
documents said. He coerced them into working as prostitutes, sometimes after
harassing, beating and threatening to kill them, according to documents.

How Not to Catch A Predator

www.theoakbook.com/MoreDetail.aspx?Aid=1780&CatId=108

[Last access date unavailable]

Exact numbers are
hard to come by, but from the OPD’s report and Brantley’s experience
interviewing and counseling hundreds of girls seeking to leave prostitution,
a few generalizations can be made about the girls Ms. Babaoye
and others see every day: the majority are fifteen years of age or younger,
most are from outside of Alameda County, and many are from outside of
California. The vast majority suffer reproductive
health problems, and most have lived in group homes, and have suffered
physical or sexual abuse in those homes.

But Ms. Brantley’s
favorite number is 95 percent. That percentage refers to the girls she speaks
with at juvenile hall who tell her that they want help leaving prostitution.
The problem is not one of will, but one of resources. While Oakland
and AlamedaCounty are praised for the progressive
collaboration between social services and law enforcement to combat child
prostitution, most girls who go through the system return to the streets. “In
six months, sometimes we see a girl in juvenile hall and under arrest...
three or four times in six months,” says Ms. Brantley.

What she wants to
see is a safe house where child prostitutes can live for a month to escape
the pimps fighting to drag them back to the streets. Without that, many girls
now are placed in group homes that perversely become the targets of pimps and
predators looking for vulnerable girls.

Guam: Police can
help parents with children beyond control

Mindy Fothergill, KUAM News, September 01,
2007

At one time this article had been archived
and may possibly still be accessible [here]

[accessed 10 August 2011]

More than a dozen
minors were taken into custody on Friday charged with accepting money for sex
and stealing cars and breaking into homes. Those involved range in age from
11 to 19. The male minors would seek out potential "John's", those
willing to pay for sex. The female teens would then have the men take them to
various places for sex in return for money, alcohol, and marijuana. In some
cases the men would have sex with the minors, then
stop by a store to purchase alcohol. When the man returned from the store
he'd find his car was stolen by the very people he had just paid for sexual
acts.

Shared Hope International-Students Take Action

www.sharedhope.org/involved/students_involved.asp

[Last access date unavailable]

SEX TRAFFICKING
AWARENESS AND PREVENTION COLLEGE MATERIALS - Are you a student or professor who wants
to raise awareness about sex trafficking and modern-day slavery? Shared Hope
International’s Sex Trafficking
Awareness and Prevention College Materials includes two ground-breaking
documentaries with undercover footage from sex markets around the world,
educational Power Point presentations, discussion guides and other valuable
resources. Help prevent the horrors of modern-day slavery by educating your
community.

GIRLS LURED INTO SEX
TRADE
- As a result of November's arrests, Nashville
resident Cristina Andres Perfecto pleaded guilty to two counts of commercial
sex trafficking and admitted luring two Mexican girls to the United States by telling them they would be
employed at a restaurant in Nashville.

Perfecto admitted
she knew all along that the girls, who were 13 and 17, would be coerced to
engage in prostitution in brothels in Memphis
and Nashville.
Perfecto said physical force and threats against the victims and their
families were used to force the girls to engage in prostitution.

To help young girls
who have been prostituted, Georgia
lawmakers have earmarked $140,000 - far less than advocates wanted. The
Juvenile Justice Fund had sought $700,000 from Georgia's 2008 general budget.
Its goal was to open a seven-bed regional assessment center and emergency
shelter for sexually exploited children.

Many prostituted
girls end up locked in youth detention centers or back on the streets. One
option is Angela's House, a group home in rural FultonCounty, that the Juvenile Justice Fund owns.But the house has room for only six girls
at a time, and they stay for up to six months. In five years, more than 90
girls, some as young as 11, have come to Angela's House for help. Some were
runaways lured into prostitution, some were kidnapped and forced into
prostitution, some were homeless and desperate.

Teen prostitution.
The words usually conjure up images of young girls walking the streets. But a
new study, the first in the city to extensively interview sexually exploited
children, suggests that many of the conventional stereotypes are wrong."The most surprising is the amount of
boys that are doing this,” says Meredith Dank.

The prostitutes the
group recruited were as young as 13 years old. One victim told the FBI that
Thompkins promised her a cell phone, a house and a car if she made enough
money prostituting in Atlantic City.
When she told him she was only 14, he said “A lot of the girls started
working for me when they were that young.”The ring operated from 1999 through 2005 in Atlantic
City, New York, Las
Vegas, Boston and Miami.

On Friday,
Thompkins, who is from the Bronx, was
sentenced to 280 months in prison. There is no parole in the federal system.
Thompkins also must pay a $5,000 fine and will be supervised for the rest of
his life upon his release.

Police report reveals more about Phoenix prostitution
ring

Fox 11 News Tucson, 3/14/2007

www.visionabolition.org/time/news.php

[accessed 10 August 2011]

A police report sheds
new light on a growing problem in the Valley, child prostitution. A police
report reveals new details of a recent prostitution ring, busted up just a
few weeks ago, involving a 12- and a 15-year-old girl.

Their stories could
be about any prostitute really. The youngest one, the 12-year-old, said she
was molested by her father and a repeat runaway.Until one day at a mall she met the wrong
man.The girls were forced to work up
to 16 hours a day, walking the streets, like 27th Avenue and Glendale.Sometimes they were taken out of state, to Los
Angeles and Las Vegas.

Keeping our teens safe from exploitation

Jodi Summit, The Timberjay
Newspapers Volume 18, Issue 6

At one time this article had been archived
and may possibly still be accessible [here]

[accessed 10 August 2011]

Minske, from north
central Minnesota,
has been speaking on the topic for several years. This grandmother to 12
hopes her educational message will help end the commercial sexual
exploitation of children that is occurring throughout rural and urban parts
of the state, and across the nation. While many rural residents think child
prostitution is an urban problem, Minske said there
have been several high profile cases in northern Minnesota, including areas
around Duluth and Brainerd, where teens have been recruited into
prostitution, often by men or women who find vulnerable children at malls or
other teenage gathering spots, then befriend them and often trick them into
prostitution.

The number one area
in Minnesota
for recruiting teens to prostitution is the Mall of America, Minske said, where pimps will befriend teens, buy them
meals and clothes, and then gain enough control to get them into the trade.

The average age of
a teen entering prostitution is now between 13 and 14, Minske
said.

Teenage prostitutes
in the United States can
escape life on the streets with help from a Los Angeles charity, called Children of the
Night. VOA's Mike O'Sullivan reports, the group has helped thousands of
youngsters since it was founded.For
27 years, Children of the Night has helped young
prostitutes find shelter and get away from life on the streets.

At her plea
hearing, Perfecto admitted that she told the girls, who were 13 and 17 years of
age at the time, that they would be employed at a restaurant in Nashville, knowing all along that the girls would be
coerced to engage in prostitution in brothels in Memphis
and Nashville.Perfecto further admitted that co-defendant
Juan Mendez then used physical force and threats against the victims and
their families to force the victims to engage in prostitution.

Lexington County
Sheriff's Department detectives on Sunday charged three men with having sex
with a girl, now 15, whose mother forced the girl to work as a prostitute in
order to provide money to finance the mother's crack cocaine habit.

At one time this article had been archived
and may possibly still be accessible [here]

[accessed 10 August 2011]

It's hard to
believe, but Phoenix
police say they have noticed an alarming increase in child prostitution in
the past couple of years.Girls as
young as twelve are recruited from shopping malls, arcades, schools, parks,
chat rooms and social networking sites on the Internet.They make 500 to a thousand dollars a
night. That money goes to their pimps who promise them fancy cars and
clothes. Instead, they are sexually abused, beaten and threatened.

Chelsea Woman Convicted of Engaging in
Child Prostitution Scheme

Press Release by U.S. Department of
Justice's U.S. Attorney's office for Massachusetts,
January 22, 2007

As part of the plea
agreement, DIAZ admitted that between approximately July 2003 and May 2005,
she operated an escort service that advertised in multiple publications and
websites, and sent individuals – including minors - - on prostitution calls
in and around Boston.
DIAZ primarily operated the business out of her home in Chelsea. In addition, DIAZ at times
traveled to other states for the purpose of having individuals -- including
minors -- engage in commercial sex. DIAZ kept all or part of the money
obtained for the sex acts performed.DIAZ also admitted that in July of 2003, she transported Minor A and
Minor B, ages 15 and 13 respectively, to New York City to engage in prostitution.
DIAZ arranged this meeting through her business, paid for the hotel, supplied
condoms and received the money paid by the callers.

"This year, we
[were heading] toward over 600 arrests of girls under 18," she said.
"We didn’t know [how big the picture was]. We had a woman come in from
the Asian [Health] Clinic a year ago who said, ‘We couldn’t figure out why
these girls had so many sexually transmitted diseases, and we figured it out
that these girls are working as prostitutes.’"

"What’s
troubling is that the girls are younger and younger," said Quan. "The girls that are targeted now are between
13 and 15 years old."To compare,
older high school girls are less vulnerable. "They know that they have
options; they’re stronger," she said.

Women charged with offering girls for sex

Josh Noel, Chicago Tribune, Jan 11, 2007

At one time this article had been archived
and may possibly still be accessible [here]

[accessed 11 August 2011]

Two Chicago women are
accused of using a popular Internet site to sell sex with girls as young as
14, authorities said today.The women
placed pictures and advertisements for sex with adult women on
craigslist.com, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart said at a news conference today.
But undercover sheriff's officers who responded to the ads discovered the
girls involved were as young as 14, the sheriff's office said.

The arrests are the
first time the CookCounty sheriff's police
have arrested anyone in connection with child prostitution on the Internet.

Atlanta’s slave trade

Diane Loupe, The Sunday Paper SP, January
7-13, 2007

www.docstoc.com/docs/20084022/Atlantas-slave-trade

[accessed 11 August 2011]

RECRUITED IN SCHOOLS
AND CHURCHES
- Nicole’s striking good looks always attracted the attention of older men.
One 28-year-old boyfriend continued to have sex with her even after she
admitted she was 14. He invited friends to have sex with her, too. Girls such as Nicole often engage in
“survival sex”—trading sex for food or shelter—says McCullough. That’s due in
part to the fact that 68 percent of adult prostitutes were sexually abused as
children; many, like Nicole, actually became prostitutes as children.

Oakland Sees Spike In
Child Prostitution

KGO-TV/DT, December 17, 2006

abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/local&id=4860254

[accessed 11 August 2011]

A recent
prostitution sweep conducted by Oakland
police led to 48 arrests -- 8 of them minors -- one, just 13-years-old. The
department calls the human trafficking of minors "organized crime"
that's making Oakland's
streets a magnet for child predators.Eight minors were arrested for prostitution on Thursday night in this
sweep -- 13,14,15-years-old.

It is beyond
unusual for a mayor, especially the mayor of a city that depends as heavily
on tourism as Atlanta,
to shine a spotlight on a problem as repellent as child prostitution. I asked
the mayor why she went ahead with such a high-profile campaign, which
includes a “Dear John” initiative that has flooded the city with posters and
public service announcements declaring that the men who “buy sex from our
kids” will no longer be tolerated.

“We take the
position in my administration that the best way to solve a problem is to face
the facts,” she said, adding: “We know the problem is here. It’s happening on
our watch. It’s unacceptable behavior, and we are
not going to stand for it. So look for us to do everything in our power to
change it.”

Rising Child Prostitution in America

[access information unavailable]

LEADERS UNITE TO
FIGHT PROSTITUTION -
Community leaders admit they let their guard down a bit, and once again young
girls are being exploited and pimped. In the last battle against the problem,
city of Atlanta
leaders went after adult entertainment clubs, shutting many of them
down. Now, they say their approach needs to be much more sophisticated,
and it's going to take the entire community to pitch in and help. It
was a problem Atlanta
community leaders thought they had tackled years ago -- child
prostitution. Girls as young as 11 and 12 years old being exploited,
placed on the streets of Atlanta
...

MAN
ACCUSED OF CHILD PROSTITUTION- In a statement to investigators, one victim said "I don't
like where I’m staying. Our mother just pimps us." The three girls,
including two sisters, say the abuse happened in Hatch's office at his used
car lot.

More than 30 public
and private agencies joined today in a coalition to try counter child and
teen prostitution, a problem Suffolk County District Attorney Daniel F.
Conley described as "the nation's least recognized epidemic."

"Child
prostitution is trending upward," said Boston Police Superintendent
Margo Hill. "Technology has helped. Cell phones have taken a lot of it
inside. Gang affiliations (with prostitution) also are disturbing.

Child prostitution becoming more common in
Arizona

Melissa Phillips, 3TV reporter, AZ Family,
October 5, 2006

At one time this article had been archived
and may possibly still be accessible [here]

[accessed 11 August 2011]

"Child
prostitution has become and is growing epidemic in the state of Arizona and the city of Phoenix," said Chief Jack Harris of
the Phoenix Police Department. "There have been over 35 child
prostitutes. These are girls ranging from the age of 13 to 17 years of
age."

Investigators say
the girl, who was 13 years old at the time, told a teenage girlfriend, also
alleged to have been smuggled and forced to have sex for money with many men
here, of her plan to escape to Mexico. Affidavits say the friend informed one
or both of their captors, a reportedly 32-year-old Idaho
carpenter and a 42-year-old Jackson
restaurateur -- both in custody -- of the escape plan. That caused the
alleged coyote-ringleaders to threaten to kill a man the 13-year-old victim
said she “had met and liked” in Phoenix
if she tried to run away, the documents say.

Two teenagers
testifying in a child sex-trafficking trial are like hundreds of child
prostitutes working the Houston
streets in a struggle for survival, an expert on child prostitution said Wednesday.
The children often willingly become prostitutes because they are fending for
themselves on the streets, are abandoned by adults, and have no other way.

Notable New Yorkers: Rachel Lloyd

Kate Sullivan, CBS Broadcasting Inc., New York, Sep 4, 2006

At one time this article had been archived
and may possibly still be accessible [here]

[accessed 11 August 2011]

Tracy, 17, explains that
her landlord promised her an apartment, but then forced her into
prostitution. He became her pimp, and subjected her to countless sexual acts
with adult men.

"Most of the
time a pimp will say you are going to be famous. That's the line. Everybody's
going to love you."

Tracy said it was that
seduction and deception that affected her deeply. "It was scary. I just
wake up and I just started to cry, starting to think about it."

Like Tracy, an estimated 2-thousand children are forced into
prostitution every year in New York
alone. They are often prosecuted and incarcerated - left to deal with the
emotional scars on their own.

Three plead guilty to interstate
transportation of minors for prostitution

U.S. Department of
Justice, Stephen J. Murphy United
States Attorney Eastern District of
Michigan, August 28, 2006– Press
Release

At one time this article had been archived
and may possibly still be accessible [here]

[accessed 11 August 2011]

At today’s plea
hearing, defendants admitted that in May 2005, Deric Willoughby and Brandy Shope brought two minors, aged 14 and 15, to Willoughby’s
residence in Toledo, Ohio and, along with Jennifer Huskey,
agreed to prostitute the minors. Defendant’s Shope
and Huskey instructed the minors that they would
have to engage in commercial sexual acts for money, including sexual
intercourse and oral sex, that they would be required to call Deric
Willoughby “Daddy” and that they would have to respect and obey Willoughby in all
things.

Prostitution of Girls a Growing Problem

Cultural Legacy

culturallegacy.org/templates/System/details.asp?id=25220&PID=381996

[accessed 11 August 2011]

The Phoenix Police
Department recently identified 60 pimps in the city bent on luring children
into prostitution — by trolling area malls. More shockingly, it's not just
happening in Phoenix.The Phoenix Police Department spends as
much as 40 percent of its work combating juvenile prostitution. In response,
City Councilwoman Peggy Bilsten has created a task
force to study child prostitution — and initiate community conversations in
an effort to toughen Arizona
laws.

Bilsten warned that the
predators are targeting girls as young as 11."They take an average-looking girl and they go and start telling
her how beautiful she is," she told Family News in Focus. "For an
example, they say, 'Hey, we'd like you to be a model.' And, within about 90
minutes, they have this young person where they want them."

Another emerging
problem in the human trafficking world is gangs, he said. California
gangs are starting to venture into the lucrative crime by recruiting girls from
U.S.
elementary and high schools into prostitution with the promise of good money
and nice clothes, he said. But conditions soon change and girls are forced to
stay, he said. Some girls are trafficked out of state, said Castro, noting
that San Diego
law enforcers have three or four such open investigations.

A harrowing picture
of the seamy world of child prostitution is emerging in court documents
stemming from a nationwide crackdown that has produced 543 arrests and 94
convictions.

In Detroit,
four Ohio
residents were charged in December with holding girls as prisoners and making
them call their pimp "Daddy."

Indictments of 16
people in Harrisburg, Pa., in December alleged that one
12-year-old girl was forced to have sex to pay for her grandfather's crack
cocaine.

The indictments
also said pimps from Toledo,
Ohio, bought women from one
another and beat them if they didn't make enough money.Of more than 100 prostitutes identified in
that investigation, more than 20 were underage; the youngest was 13. Many
were rotated through rest areas and truck stops from California
to Maryland.

Intelligence Analyst Works to Save Kids

Published: July 15, 2006 -- Source: FBI

newsblaze.com/story/20060715143219tsop.nb/topstory.html

[accessed 11 August 2011]

I recently worked
on a major child prostitution investigation called "Precious
Cargo," which centered on sex trafficking in Pennsylvania,
but reached as far away as Florida, Michigan, and Oklahoma.
We had intelligence that showed Harrisburg
was a hub for trafficking and that minors and adult victims were being
prostituted at truck stops. I worked alongside the Pennsylvania State Police,
the Internal Revenue Service, the U.S. Attorney's Office, and the FBI's
office in Harrisburg.
The evidence we gathered exposed the massive scope of the prostitution ring.
Last December, a Federal Grand Jury returned indictments against 21
individuals on charges of sex trafficking of children, money laundering, and
conspiracy.

Man accused of pimping teenagers

www.columbiatribune.com/2006/Jun/20060624News022.asp

[Last access date unavailable]

The teens, who had
run away from home, told police they had been working as prostitutes since
meeting Elbert at a liquor store about a month ago. They said he took all of
their earnings as payment for a place to live, clothes and food.

Every year the
number of child prostitutes on the streets of AlamedaCounty
grows. The number of people working to reverse this alarming trend grows just
as rapidly.Last Wednesday, more than
200 of them gathered for a two-day Sexually Exploited Minors Conference --
about 50 more people than event planners anticipated.

A horrible achievement - Atlanta's child prostitution business is
booming

"They throw
the children in the trunk of a car, take them to another city and trade them
to another pimp," Espy says. That's a possible death sentence. At the
very least, the children know they may never see their families or homes
again.

There were also 2,669
reported incidents of online enticement of children for sexual acts, 611 for
unsolicited obscene material sent to a child, 841 misleading domain names, 1,640 reports of child sexual molestation by other than
family members, 553 of child prostitution and 202 for child sex tourism. This
practice involves adults traveling to foreign countries to engage in sexual
activity with children. It is estimated to draw more than one million
children into the sex trade each year, especially in developing countries.

The defendants
transported the girl from Massachusetts to Maine, Connecticut, Rhode Island and New
Hampshire to engage in prostitution between October
2000 and September 2002 when she from 13 to 15 years old, prosecutors said.

They performed sex
acts with men in cheap motel rooms, alleys and the back seats of cars, they
said. Clients had 10 minutes or it cost extra. One girl, 14 when she was recruited,
said her quota was $500 a night, with various sex acts ranging in price from
$50 to $150.

Three Mexican Nationals Convicted of Sex
Trafficking

United StatesAttorney,
U.S. Department of
Justice, HoustonTX, February 6, 2006

At one time this article had been archived
and may possibly still be accessible [here]

[accessed 12 August 2011]

At their
re-arraignment hearings, the men were convicted of being part of an
organization that operated between early 2004 through the summer of 2005, to
(1) recruit, entice, harbor, transport, provide and obtain young Mexican
women and girls, and benefitting financially from participating in a venture
knowing that force, fraud and coercion would be used to cause the young
Mexican women and girls to engage in commercial sex acts, and to (2) entice,
harbor, transport, provide and obtain young Mexican women and girls, and
benefit financially from participation in a venture knowing that the girls,
not yet the age of 18, would be engaging in a commercial sex act.

The rain began to
fall harder. The cousins, ages 14 and 15, took the adults up on their offer
of a ride. The girls later told police they picked up some Chinese takeout
and went over to a Downing
Avenue house.Once inside, police said, Willoughby
locked the door and set an alarm system."It was made clear to them they weren't free to leave," said
Detective Raisanen. "They were told, 'This is
your house now. Deric is your daddy, and that's how you'll refer to him, and
this is what you'll be expected to do, and if you don't comply, there's going
to be consequences,' … arguably for the rest of their lives."

Monica Sartin came to Jonesboro
last year, escaping what she calls an abusive relationship with her
ex-husband. Addicted to crack cocaine and meth, Monica has fought demons
since she first tried drugs at age 11. She turned her first trick at 12.

If the brutal world
of teenage prostitution were a legitimate business, Toledo would be among its top employment
agencies.It has supplied top management
— iron-fisted pimps who demanded worker productivity and loyalty.

Disturbing trend: More and more young girls
are being drawn into sex trade

Karen Eschbacher,
The Patriot Ledger, January 07, 2006

At one time this article had been archived and
may possibly still be accessible [here]

[accessed 12 August 2011]

Prostitutes as
young as 11 or 12 are often lured into the business by pimps who promise
money, clothes and other niceties. They then work for operations that claim
to be escort services or massage parlors and recruit customers online or in
newspapers, O’Connell said.

Justin's dark
coming-of-age story is a collateral effect of recent technological advances.
Minors, often under the online tutelage of adults, are opening for-pay
pornography sites featuring their own images sent onto the Internet by
inexpensive Webcams. And they perform from the privacy of home, while parents
are nearby, beyond their children's closed bedroom door.

The Youngest
Profession

Claudia Rowe, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, December 6,
2005

www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-139516179.html

[partially accessed 12 August 2011 - access
restricted]

SEATTLE IS A HUB FOR
LURING TEENS INTO LIVES OF PROSTITUTION - The Seattle that
Alisha knows is not a city of social liberalism or glittering scenery. For
her, it is just a series of worn-out highways where men will happily pay a
15-year-old for sex.

Prostitutes in
Cyberspace

The Wave Magazine

At one time this article had been archived
and may possibly still be accessible [here]

[accessed 12 August 2011]

In the past several
months, the South San Francisco police have arrested nearly two
dozen people – including at least
eight juveniles – for alleged involvement in prostitution. The most
recent arrest occurred on November 9, when undercover police caught
20-year-old TykiaConway,
and a 14-year-old girl in a South
San Francisco motel after responding to a solicitation posted on Craigslist.
Earlier that same week, a 22-year-old Martinez
woman was arrested for allegedly attempting to sell her four-year-old daughter for sex on Craiglist,
but was later released due to lack of evidence.

In one of the largest
coordinated enforcement actions ever taken against child prostitution rings
in the United States, 19 individuals have been arrested and more than 30
charged in the latest phase of "Innocence Lost," an ongoing
national investigation into criminal enterprises involved in the recruitment
of children for prostitution.

Based on their
experiences, the report said, most of the girls, 86 percent, engage in
prostitution at least once a week, and almost two-thirds of the girls have
pimps over the age of 18."A lot
of these girls are runaways," said sheriff's Deputy Rick Castro, a
former Vista deputy who wasn't interviewed
for the study. "They (pimps) promise them a nice place and nice
clothes."

DETROIT,
MICHIGAN/HONOLULU, HAWAII - The indictment alleges that during May
2005, defendants Willoughby, Shope, Huskey, and Gordon engaged in a conspiracy to commit the
offenses of sexual exploitation of children and transportation of children
for the purposes of prostitution. Specifically, the defendants are alleged to
have transported two minor girls from their hometown of Toledo,
Ohio to Michigan for the purpose of forcing the
two minors to engage in commercial sexual acts for money.

I was
14 years old when I was forced into prostitution. Like many teens at that
age, finding my own identity and defying my parents were top on my list. So when
a man came into my life and showered me with attention and listened to me
when I complained about my parents, I did not think twice that he was ten
years my senior. After all, he said I was mature for my age and told me I
understood him better than anyone his own age.

Johnny Gosch was a victim in 1982 at age 11 when he was abducted
by kidnappers in Des Moines,
Iowa, while on his newspaper
route."He was sold to an
organized pedophilia ring where rich pedophiles hire people to kidnap
children and then purchase them to molest," said Noreen Gosch, Johnny's mother, who told the story at the
conference. Johnny visited his mother many years later in the middle of the
night. He told her he had escaped from his captors and was living undercover
for fear of being killed, she said.

Martinez Mom Allegedly
Offers Daughter, 4, For Sex

Bay City News, Martinez, Nov 12, 2005

At one time this article had been archived
and may possibly still be accessible [here]

[accessed 12 August 2011]

The
Martinez Police Department reports that a 22-year-old resident was arrested
Tuesday for allegedly offering her four-year-old child for sex.Police received a tip from the NationalCenter for Missing and Exploited
Children regarding a posting on Craigslist that was soliciting for
prostitution.

Since
September, the 15-year-old girl had been raped repeatedly, threatened with death
and sold for sex over the Internet, police said.Her captors hid the runaway in a
hollowed-out box spring covered with a piece of wood and tucked underneath a
bed in a small apartment complex adjacent to Interstate 17 in west Phoenix.

Suspect in runaway prostitute case was
child prostitute

The Associated Press AP, Nov 10, 2005

At one time this article had been archived
and may possibly still be accessible [here]

[accessed 13 August 2011]

Butler was similarly
imprisoned by a pimp in 2003, when police said she was among eight girls kept
in a locked apartment. Butler refused to
testify against Christopher Arbuckle, 26, who was convicted of holding the
girls and is serving time in an Arizona
prison.

Countywide,
76 girls were arrested last year on suspicion of teen prostitution -- a 27
percent increase over a one-year period. And a majority are coerced -- some
by family or friends. Others like Sarah are forced by strangers.

Sex trafficking hits home

Emily Kaiser, The Minnesota Daily,
October 31, 2005

At one time this article had been archived
and may possibly still be accessible [here]

[accessed 18 September 2011]

You
couldn't spot them on the street, but right now there are slaves living in
local neighborhoods, hidden in basements and being transported along area
highways.The CIA estimates 50,000 women
and children are transported each year throughout the United States
by being conned and forced into a life of sexual exploitation. The FBI
estimates that the average age of a prostitute in the United States
is 13.

To stop a forced sex trade

Emily Kaiser, The Minnesota Daily,
November 1, 2005

At one time this article had been archived
and may possibly still be accessible [here]

[accessed 18 September 2011]

She
said she was trafficked by her family as a young girl and escaped by saving
money for college. Stark attended the University her first year and
transferred to University of Wisconsin-Madison to get away from her family.

Rural Minnesota is one of the sex trafficking pipelines to
larger cities, such as Chicago,
she said.

[B]
COUNTRY UPDATES – UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
–
ECPAT USA has carried out
research into child prostitution in New
York City. The research highlights a number of
alarming trends. Firstly, the average age of prostituted youth is decreasing
from fourteen to thirteen and even twelve years of age. It is believed that
in New York City,
there are more boys than girls in prostitution. Secondly, the situation of
sexually exploited youth is becoming more violent in terms of physical and
sexual violence and the forms of high risk sex youth are forced to engage
in.Thirdly, it is becoming more difficult
to monitor the number of sexually exploited youth because prostitution has
increasingly moved off the streets. Finally, the research concludes that
there are insufficient services to provide sexually exploited youth with the
opportunities and support that would allow them to leave and recover from
sexual exploitation and other abuses.

Report by Special
Rapporteur[DOC]

UN Economic and Social Council Commission
on Human Rights, Fifty-ninth session, 6 January 2003

[77] Children in
prostitution under 18 but over the age of sexual consent may incur criminal
liability and be dealt with by a juvenile court. The age of
consent ranges from 14 to 18 years throughout the 50
states. Information was received about the particular situation of
children in prostitution in New York
City, concluding that although the overwhelming
majority of these children are runaways or castaways from dysfunctional homes
where they have suffered physical, psychological and sexual abuse, the
prevailing view of them is still that they are “bad kids”. They
are arrested more often than their pimps and customers and can face police
brutality, particularly those working on the streets and those addicted to
drugs. In order for a case to be prosecuted against a pimp, at
least one of the pimp’s girls must testify. Most refuse, as they
rely on the pimp for food and shelter and often remain very loyal to the pimp
despite the level of abuse. Any statements they make against the
pimp will be self-incriminating. As a result of the increased
police presence and likelihood of being arrested in Manhattan over the last
year, both adults and children have moved to more dangerous and secluded
industrial areas of town.

Bold
teenage prostitute wanted out of 'game'; Toledoan
is home insisting she's not afraid

To Jessica's mother,
transactional sex has its advantages."You marry a guy and you gotta give him
sex and you're not even getting basically nothing
out of it," she said."These
ones I can send home when I'm done with them."

Young
Lives For Sale - Why more kids are getting into the sex trade--and how the
feds are fighting back

Kristie was 13 when
she met the first of her four "daddies." She had run away from home
in the Southwest, and friends introduced her to a tall, good-looking man, who
said the red-haired teenager was sexy and had potential. Pretty soon, he had
her prostituting herself on the streets of Las Vegas--and
then Los Angeles, Atlanta,
and Phoenix.

Federal Grand Jury Indicts District Man for
Interstate Sex Trafficking and Rape of Children and Adult Females

6 October 2005 -- Source: U.S.Newswire

At one time this article had been archived
and may possibly still be accessible [here]

[accessed 13 August 2011]

The indictment
alleges that he recruited females as young as 14 years of age to engage in
prostitution for his own financial benefit. He caused these females to
prostitute in D.C. and other locations, including Maryland,
New York, and Florida. He used emotional and physical
violence, including armed threats, to ensure their compliance with his rules.

Teen's
Horror Story Leads To Prostitution Ring Bust

Local10.com News, Miami, October 5, 2005

www.local10.com/news/5061851/detail.html

[accessed 13 August 2011]

Miami police say that
they have busted a prostitution ring that was recruiting and using underage
girls as prostitutes.

A 16-year-old
runaway told her parents about the sex ring when she was returned home last
weekend. She said she met a man who said he would help her find work and a
place to stay. Then she says the man, xxxxxxxxxx,
took her into a bedroom and had sex with her to "test her employment
skills." She says he then handed her over to five men who took turns
having sex with her to induct her into the "family," a prostitution
ring

In addition to
being owned and managed by xxxxxxxxx police say the
prostitution ring has an enforcer whose job was to take the girls on location
and physically enforce the rules by beating the girls if they got out of
line.

In the past 12
months, immigration agents have raided a number of suspected brothels in
quiet San Francisco
neighborhoods, exposing a previously unseen tragedy.Despite shock at how it could happen here,
prostitution of youth is sadly all too common in our community and, in fact,
often involves children as young as 9 years old. – htsccp

GEORGIA: Child
Prostitution: The Hidden Crime

Ty Tagmai, Atlanta
Journal-Constitution, 08.17.2005

www.aegis.com/news/ads/2005/AD051901.html

[accessed 13 August 2011]

The report found
child prostitution prevalent in rich and poor neighborhoods. Children were
forced into sex work from south Atlanta's Metropolitan Parkway
- an area known for prostitution - to uptown Buckhead's Pharr Road and in "some of the
finest hotels in Atlanta,"
the report stated. Prostitution-related activity was observed around most
city public schools, especially those in predominantly black areas. The
report included detailed maps describing where child prostitution had been
detected.

Specifically, Doss
and Ford allegedly conspired to recruit a 14-year-old female and a
16-year-old female to work as prostitutes for Doss. Once the victims were
recruited, the indictment alleges, the defendants transported them to various
locations in California, including Los Angeles, Sacramento
and Oakland,
for the purpose of prostitution. On several occasions, the indictment
alleges, Doss and Ford also transported these minors from Los
Angeles and other parts of California
to Reno, Nevada for the purpose of prostitution.

"It's a
geographic epidemic," said Nola Brantley, director of parenting and
youth enrichment for the GeorgeScotlanYouthCenter
in West Oakland. "The numbers are
growing, and the girls are younger and younger. A few years ago we saw girls
in the older end of junior high school age. Now we're seeing girls entering
junior high school. Twelve-year-olds are giving strangers (oral sex) for
$3."

The "most
alarming thing" is the increased number of juveniles and how young the
teen prostitutes are, said Lighten. The youngest to be arrested on suspicion
of an act of prostitution was 12.More
than 800 suspected prostitutes have been arrested in the last year, said
Officer Mark Turpin of the Special Victims Unit. And, about one in every five
is a juvenile.

Teen Prostitution

The Guardian, March 09, 2004

www.kidsvoiceorg.com/Guardian/Episodes.aspx?episode=date20040309

[accessed 14 August 2011]

[scroll down]

Teen prostitution
and the sexual exploitation of children is a growing problem in the United States.
Government statistics report a substantial increase in teen prostitution, and
indicate that thirteen is the average age of newly recruited teen
prostitutes. Although the majority of teen prostitutes are runaways
from poor and inner-city neighborhoods, the percentage of teen prostitutes
from upper and middle class homes is trending upward.

Concrete
Is Cold And Hard At Night: The Children’s Voices

Jay Shaft, Coalition For Free Thought In
Media, Voices Of The Lost And Forgotten - Part Three, 18 May 2005

RUNAWAY
AND DISCARDED CHILDREN
- “At least I’m not on the corner trickin’ and smokin’ rock,” she says, while missing the irony of her
statements. “If I gotta give up my ass I’m gonna do it my way. If I don’t like a guy I’m stayin’ with I just find another one. Lots of guys out
there would kill to have a fourteen year old livin’
with ‘em and givin’ up ass.”

Exploited Girls in U.S. Seek
Same Protection Afforded Foreign Women

Jim Lobe, OneWorld.net, WashingtonDC,
March 5, 2004

www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0305-07.htm

[accessed 14 August 2011]

Children forced to
become prostitutes in the United States
should receive far more protection and support from government and
non-governmental agencies than they are receiving today, according to five
survivors of domestic sex trafficking in the United States who spoke at an
unprecedented Congressional briefing on sexually exploited youth.

Special Report: Selling Atlanta’s Children - Runaway girls lured
into the sex trade are being jailed for crimes while their adult pimps go
free

Jane O. Hansen, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Jan. 7, 2001

At one time this article had been archived
and may possibly still be accessible [here]

[accessed 14 August 2011]

"I think I
have been locked up long enough," the girl said in a small, high-pitched
voice. She began to cry and rubbed her eyes with balled-up fists. "If
you would just let me go home…"But for children like her and her 11-year-old sister, also an alleged
prostitute, it’s not that simple.In Atlanta, prostituted
children often go to jail while the adults who exploit them go free, court
records show.

Thailand Ranks Third in
Number of Child Prostitution –[Editor’s note: U.S.A
Ranks Second]

Thailand ranks third after India and the U.S. in the number of child
prostitutes, the United Nations (UN) said in its report prepared for the
Second World Congress Against Commercial Sexual Exploitation. According to the U.N.
report, about 400,000 women and children are believed to be sexually exploited
in India, between 244,000
and 325,000 in the U.S.,
200,000 in Thailand,
175,000 in eastern and central Europe, 100,000 in Brazil
and 35,000 in West Africa.

Sex trafficking is
known to destroy the lives of women and children internationally, but it is
also "homegrown" and devastates the lives of American youth from
all economic levels. Summer is fast approaching and with it an increase in
the number of children living on the streets at risk for increased commercial
sexual exploitation. They live in fear of losing their coping mechanisms
(drugs and alcohol), and fear of losing a place to live and food to eat.
These children are also ashamed and fear their families will find out what
they have been doing. They fear the police and fear being returned home.

ANTI-HUMAN
TRAFFICKING NEWSLETTER - THIS ISSUE HIGHLIGHTS FACTORS AFFECTING THE
TRAFFICKING OF AMERICAN CHILDREN

Kris, age 15, was
lured from a Brooklyn party by four people
she met there, raped and nearly forced into a life of prostitution.She is not a runaway.She's a typical New York teen, a good student who comes
from a strong, loving and supportive family ...

Ellen, a 16-year
old runaway, was forced to work for a NJ prostitution ring that operated out
of motels ...

Debbie, 15 years
old, the middle child in a close-knit Air Force family from suburban Phoenix and a
straight-A student, was kidnapped from the driveway of her home one
evening.Tied up, threatened and
driven around Phoenix
for hours, she was drugged and brought into a building where six men
gang-raped her.They advertised her
on Craigslist in a section entitled
"Teen Love".

Fact Sheet: Commercial Sexual Exploitation[PDF]

United Nations Children's Fund UNICEF, 22
July 2004

At one time this article had been archived
and may possibly still be accessible [here]

[accessed 14 June 2011]

FACTS
AND FIGURES
- An estimated 2 million children, the majority of them girls, are sexually
exploited in the multi-billion dollar commercial sex industry. At the end of
2000, as many as 325,000 children were at risk of commercial sexual
exploitation in the United
States alone.

Teen prostitution is also a suburban
problem, says former Minneapolis mayor Hofstede

T.W. Budig,
Capitol Roundup, 4 November 1999

At one time this article had been archived
and may possibly still be accessible [here]

[accessed 9 August 2011]

The most vulnerable
category of children susceptible to becoming involved in prostitution are runaway or homeless youths, the report notes.A child is usually approached by a person
willing to pay for sex within 36 to 48 hours of the child being on the
street, the report states.

While a 1997 WilderResearchCenter study estimated that there
are some 730 homeless youth s in Minnesota
on any given night, other social agencies put the figure much higher ó as
high as 2000 to 3000.

The Covenant House
NINELINE (1-800-999-9999 /
www.nineline.org) received and immediately responded to more than 48,000
crisis calls from youngsters all over the United States who needed
immediate help and had nowhere else to turn. Acercatel,
the Covenant House 24-hour national crisis hotline in Mexico, received and responded to
more than 13,000 crisis calls.

City Announces
Crackdown On Child Prostitution

article.wn.com/link/WNATCCDE2F5323943617EF444B509C3352D4?source=

templategenerator&template=womansglobe/headlines.txt

[Last access date unavailable]

A new city program to combat child
prostitution will crack down on the pimps who exploit kids and also provide a
residential treatment facility to help heal the children arrested for the
crime.The Sexual Assault and Violence
Intervention Program, based at Mount SinaiMedicalCenter
in Manhattan,
will provide the counselors for those children arrested, officials said.

She was a teenage
girl from an impoverished village in Bangladesh. The American couple
offered her transport to America
and a better life: a nice job as their nanny and housekeeper, wages and opportunity.
The dream offer dissolved into a nightmare as soon as she reached sunny Southern California. The couple informed her she owed
them a huge sum for bringing her into the country and forced her to work
without wages for years in their home, where she was repeatedly raped and
beaten by the husband and abused by the wife. After three failed attempts,
and with the help of good Samaritans, she finally escaped.

On child
prostitution in particular, hardly any comprehensive research has been done
to document the number of prostituted children or the circumstances that have
led them into prostitution.Much less
do we provide adequate services for them.Yet, there are as many as 400,000
prostituted children in the US.

new efforts by state
and local officials to combat child prostitution in Atlanta. The government has taken the
unprecedented step of indicting 14 suspected pimps under the RICO
anti-racketeering statute.

The (ongoing) San Diego, California
Child Mass Sexual Slavery Scandal

LibertadLatina, July 31, 2009

www.libertadlatina.org/LatAm_US_San_Diego_Crisis_Index.htm

[accessed 8 January 2011]

The articles here
below describe one of the largest known child and youth sex trafficking cases
in the United States
to date. In one of several related cases, hundreds of Mexican girls
between 7 and 18 were kidnapped or subjected to false romantic entrapment by
organized criminal sex trafficking gangs. Victims were then brought to San Diego County, California.
Over a 10 year period these girls were raped by hundreds of men per day in
more than 2 dozen home based and agricultural camp based brothels.

The Commercial Sexual Exploitation of
Children In the U. S., Canada and Mexico– Abstract

Richard J. Estes and Neil Alan Weiner,
University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work - Center for the Study of
Youth Policy, September 18, 2001

www.sp2.upenn.edu/restes/CSEC_Files/Abstract_010918.pdf

[accessed 14 August 2011]

MAJOR FINDINGS - Patterns of
child sexual exploitation are fueled by: 1) the use of prostitution by
runaway and throwaway children to provide for their subsistence needs; 2) the
presence of pre-existing adult prostitution markets in the communities where
large numbers of street youth are concentrated; 3) prior history of child
sexual abuse and child sexual assault; 4) poverty; 5) the presence of large
numbers of unattached and transient males in communities--including military
personnel, truckers, conventioneers, sex tourists, among others; 6) for some
girls, membership in gangs; 7) the promotion of juvenile prostitution by
parents, older sib-lings and boy friends; 8) the recruitment of children by
organized crime units for prostitution; and, increasingly, 9) illegal
trafficking of children for sexual purposes to the U.S. from developing
countries located in Asia, Africa, Central and South America, and Central and
Eastern Europe.

The Sexual Exploitation of Children - A
Working Guide to the Empirical Literature[PDF]

Richard J. Estes, University
of PennsylvaniaSchool of Social Work,
Center for Youth Policy Studies, August 2001